Lead Story In August police in Chandler, Arizona, confiscated a videotape that was allegedly made by four teenage boys known as the Insane Skate Posse. The tape, designed to recruit new members for their gang, showed the boys having fun smoking marijuana, drinking beer, destroying a parked car, and making harassing phone calls. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vermont Business Magazine reported last spring that the Holstein-Friesian Association, which exports pedigreed dairy cattle, gets shipments quickly to their clients in Europe and Saudi Arabia by delivering the cattle in Federal Express planes....

JULIA FISH I was not surprised to learn that Julia Fish cares very much about the work of Martin, Tobey, and Celmins, among other painters. Her recent paintings and drawings, seven of which are currently on view at Feigen–together with five 1991 works in a downstairs office–have simple subjects. But the longer I looked, the more my experience of them deepened. I was led less to identifiable themes, a definitive “vision of the world,” than to a deepening of my own inner awareness....

Sins of No-Mission Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Founded in the mid-80s by dancer/choreographer David Puszh, Puszh Studios initially focused on presenting dance events in its cozy suite of spaces at 3829 N. Broadway. When it became apparent that dance alone could not support the venue, Puszh expanded to include theater, performance art, and other attractions; one of the company’s most popular events a few years ago was a series of cabaret evenings featuring performances by local musical theater stars....

For the Bears’ last home game of the season–a frigid, icy affair against the Detroit Lions–head coach Dave Wannstedt wore a watch cap tilted across his forehead under his headphones. With its jaunty slant, the cap made him look as if his nickname ought to be “Frenchy,” and silly as it seemed there was something apropos in that. The Bears’ season had the tone of French philosophy to it. There was logic that made no sense (the quarterback can’t throw a square-out?...

A MAN WITH CONNECTIONS, Chicago Artisan Productions, at Famous Door Theater Company. Russian playwright Alexander Gelman’s conventionally realistic drama is the Russian inversion of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Andrei, a construction-site manager driven to complete a project on schedule and under budget, assigns an unsafe job to his son Alyosha (Karamazovian reference intended, no doubt), and as a result Alyosha loses both hands. But unlike Miller–who spends two acts building to the revelation that Joe Keller knowingly sold faulty airplane parts to the government during World War II and another act on Joe’s slow realization that his actions jeopardized his fighter-pilot son–Gelman has Andrei’s wife Natasha announce her husband’s moral lapse to him in the first ten minutes....

By Cara Jepsen Frank Melcori says that if his new show, I’m Afraid to Quit My Job, is successful, he’ll be able to dump his day job. In the meantime he can rationalize why he’s still there. The excuses sound familiar: for money, for benefits, because he doesn’t have another job lined up. Melcori’s one-man meditation explores just about every aspect of job-quitting malaise. It opens tonight at 8 at the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe, 2827 N....

The first Chicago Underground Film Festival will be held at two screening facilities at the Bismarck Hotel, 171 W. Randolph, from Friday through Sunday, July 29 through 31. Single-day passes are $12.50, and three-day passes are $25; single admissions are $5, except for the Tom Palazzolo program on Friday and the “New Films From the Death Trip” program on Saturday, which are $7 each. For further information call 862-4182. Film shorts, program one...

The Enunciation (What the Oxen Said) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than 40 years later, American performance artists still seem convinced that “acting” onstage is reprehensible, but unlike many of their predecessors, they offer little to take its place. Instead they pen scripts that demand skillful acting–or at least skillful reading out loud–and then imagine that sloppy, uncommitted performances somehow bring those scripts to life....

Fame Scratches at the Door Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 26-year-old native of Portland, Oregon, began his musical career as a drummer; he’s since become adept with electronics as well. He enrolled at Oberlin College in 1987 as a percussion major, but before long switched to a program called Technology in Music and Related Arts, and his interest in musique concrete and contemporary composition began to coalesce with his interest in punk rock....

Reviewing the career of pianist Henry Butler, it’s all too easy to flash back on that venerable game show of ancient TV To Tell the Truth: Will the real Henry Butler please stand up? Butler’s first two albums in the mid-80s displayed his impressive and occasionally arresting grasp of then-modern jazz. His style owed much to McCoy Tyner–no crime there–but, like Tyner himself, Butler had reduced and clarified the crashing chords and buttressing rhythms, and he showed a flair for attractive compositions and bright arranging....

Should city neighborhoods have walls around them? Should they exclude outsiders from their streets, or would that be antithetical to the very nature and vitality of the city? Some people think that questioning is something Rugai has assiduously avoided. She avoided this reporter, and in general has dodged the press. Jerry Moore, editor of the Beverly Review, laughs when told about multiple endeavors to interview the alderman: “I’ve attempted to reach her for the past week and have been unable to; I was talking to a reporter [from the Daily Southtown], and he hasn’t been able to reach her either....

The Presidents of the United States of America are Seattle pop punkers who have much more in common with jokesters like the Young Fresh Fellows than with the city’s reigning grunge gods. This is good and bad. On the one hand, the music coming out of the town can be a bit dreary; on the other, it does tend to be relatively substantive. The Presidents, by contrast, embrace the disposable and quotidian with a missionary zeal....

Although not as well known as the Hi Rhythm Section or Booker T. & the MGs, Johnny Rawls and L.C. Luckett have credentials that are almost as impressive. They were session stalwarts in and around Memphis for years; they’ve toured with artists ranging from the late O.V. Wright to the still-sizzling Lynn White; their multiinstrumental virtuosity enables them to function as virtually an entire R & B rhythm section when the occasion demands....

Salome –Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the intensity of feeling in Salome, which can exert considerable power even without Strauss’s lush music, belies Lahr’s shallow dismissal. British director Steven Berkoff’s touring revival, which played here last year, emphasized the script’s chilly dreaminess with a stylish somnambulism, evoking a 1920s silent film with its black-and-white decor and slow-mo pacing. Now, marking the 100th anniversary of Salome’s premiere (in Paris, while its author languished in an English jail for “indecent acts” of homosexuality), an off-Loop rendition affirms the work’s compelling tragic power....

Alma’s Pursuit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Skibell, whose one-woman show at Cafe Voltaire was the prototype for this collaboration, is particularly good at creating characters whose niceness borders on the pathological–though she doesn’t push it far enough. Her Pat Harper leads the audience in an orientation for our new jobs in the Sears customer service department, pausing repeatedly during her long, banal descriptions so that we fully understand her, combining the studied concern of a therapist with the condescending attention of a firstgrade teacher....

Why is it when a doctor gives you a physical examination, he taps your knee with a rubber hammer? My knee always jerks when he does this, and the same goes for everyone I have ever spoken to. Which makes me wonder if anyone has ever failed it, and what became of them. Does the medical community just go on looking, looking, hoping to find a person who fails the test?...

By Michael Miner Jose Antonio was a charming, chivalrous guy (Garcia Lorca’s friend) who made a splendid martyr, but to a cause doomed to end on history’s trash heap. “Jose Antonio’s point of view was paternalist,” wrote Hugh Thomas in The Spanish Civil War. “The liberal state, he said, has meant ‘economic servitude, because it says to the workers with tragic sarcasm: “You are free to work as you wish: no one can force you to accept such and such a condition of work....

Re: “The Sports Section,” March 4, 1994 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of all the civic and personal virtues displayed by the Norwegian hosts and spectators at the Winter Olympics, perhaps the most admirable trait (one commented on frequently by all members of the on-site media) was their sense of true sportspersonship–that is, loving the sport over the sportster, and being willing to applaud a rival if he or she is truly better than one’s own candidate....

XENOGENESIS at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t recall having seen a successful science-fiction play since the Organic’s production of Warp! Too often, the sci-fi author spends so much time making his cockeyed vision of the future seem both scientific and plausible that such necessities as character development and coherent plotting get lost. In his eagerness to explain recombinant DNA and cryogenics, Serpas fails to tell an interesting story about real people....

January 8, 1986 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Please allow me to state (with utmost sincerity) that you, Critic Peter Margasak, embody a rare and unfortunate type of human being (and I use the term lightly)–the sort that if actually found alone with a rooftop view at sunset, would have absolutely nothing to say. Nothing good, anyway [Spot Check, January 5]. But there are people who can help....